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Joe Biden Does Not Want to Defund the Police, Spokesman Says Biden Walks a Cautious Line as He Opposes Defunding the Police
(about 3 hours later)
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “does not believe that police should be defunded,” a spokesman for his campaign said Monday, weighing in on a call from protesters and activists that has gathered steam as protests against police brutality and systemic racism have grown. Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. staked out a careful position on Monday in support of a law enforcement overhaul but not defunding police departments, rebutting a new Republican attack line as he tries to harness growing activism against systemic racism while not alienating protesters or more moderate voters.
The spokesman, Andrew Bates, said in a statement that Mr. Biden “hears and shares the deep grief and frustration of those calling out for change” and “supports the urgent need for reform.” But Mr. Bates emphasized that Mr. Biden believes providing funding is necessary to help improve policing, including by supporting “community policing programs that improve relationships between officers and residents.” In the face of continuing protest marches calling to “defund the police” nationwide in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing, Mr. Biden’s campaign said in a statement that he “hears and shares the deep grief and frustration of those calling out for change” and that he “supports the urgent need for reform.” But a campaign spokesman, Andrew Bates, said flatly that Mr. Biden was opposed to cutting police funding and believed more spending was necessary to help improve law enforcement and community policing.
“This funding would also go towards diversifying police departments so that they resemble the communities in which they serve,” Mr. Bates said. “We also need additional funding for body-worn cameras.” Mr. Biden’s effort to address the calls of protesters while supporting law enforcement comes after gruesome videos and energetic protests have quickly reshaped public opinion about racial discrimination, seemingly opening a substantial window for new policies that could bring far-reaching change to law-enforcement agencies long accused of racially discriminatory practices. But there are already signs of division between activists who are eager to dismantle police departments and congressional Democrats who favor a less drastic overhaul of law enforcement.
The Biden campaign released the statement as “defund the police” has emerged as a rallying cry following the killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky., both of whom were black. Mr. Floyd died after a police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes. Ms. Taylor was shot dead by officers who entered her home during a raid. President Trump’s campaign and leading Republicans have sought to drive a wedge between the immediate-but-incremental calls for change among elected Democrats and the more sweeping demands that protesters are calling for in places like Minneapolis, where the death of Mr. Floyd after police officers pinned him down has prompted worldwide calls for racial justice.
Mr. Biden traveled to Houston on Monday to meet with Mr. Floyd’s family, and he is expected to record a video message for Mr. Floyd’s funeral, which will take place on Tuesday. Mr. Trump, for his part, has not endorsed any new changes to policing procedures or funding. On Monday, he met with law enforcement officials at the White House and showered praise on them, saying virtually all police officers were “great, great people” and boasting on Twitter that crime was low nationwide.
“Listening to one another is what will begin to heal America. That’s just what VP @JoeBiden did with the family of #GeorgeFloyd — for more than an hour,” Benjamin Crump, the lawyer working with Mr. Floyd’s family, tweeted after the meeting. “He listened, heard their pain, and shared in their woe. That compassion meant the world to this grieving family.” The debate within the Democratic Party was on plain display on Monday, as congressional leaders unveiled a broad legislative program on policing, including new limits on the use of lethal force and on the legal protections afforded to officers accused of misconduct. Only hours before, progressives at the municipal level in Minneapolis pledged on Sunday to take apart the city’s long-troubled Police Department and rebuild it altogether.
The campaign on Monday pointed to a criminal justice plan that Mr. Biden released last year, which promised $300 million for the federal Community Oriented Policing Services program, or COPS. Asked by CBS’s Norah O’Donnell on Monday if he supported defunding the police, Mr. Biden answered: “No, I don’t support defunding the police. I support conditioning federal aid to police based on whether or not they meet certain basic standards of decency and honorableness.”
More recently, Mr. Biden has called for “real police reform” and urged Congress to pass a series of measures, including ones that would outlaw chokeholds by the police, stop the transfer of military weapons to police departments and create a model standard for the use of force. He also pledged to create a national police oversight commission in his first 100 days in office. Mr. Biden’s position — a stance on policing that another prominent Democrat, Bill Clinton, might have summed up as “mend it, don’t end it” — aligned him far more closely with lawmakers in Washington than with activists and left-wing lawmakers at the municipal level. His approach drew wide support from Democratic Party officials and a number of civil rights leaders, as well as politicians in the swing states likeliest to decide the general election.
Calls for a wholesale dismantling of local police departments are a long way from becoming Democratic Party orthodoxy. Even in the progressive movement, leading presidential candidates like Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts focused their criminal justice platforms on reactive measures such as eliminating cash bail and significantly decreasing the incarcerated population. That’s in part because few Democrats have embraced activist demands to make deep cuts to police budgets or to shutter local law-enforcement agencies altogether. Answering those calls, most party leaders have tried to mingle sympathy for the underlying grievances of police critics with Biden-style rejection of ideas like police abolition.
Since the Black Lives Matter movement began in 2013, a wave of more progressive district attorneys have been elected in cities like Chicago, Philadelphia and Ferguson, Mo. Even those officials — who are often at odds with their local police departments — have not embraced a police-free future, most likely because few elected officials know what one would look like at this time. “We need police officers, and we need law enforcement,” said Bob Buckhorn, the former mayor of Tampa, Fla., and a supporter of Mr. Biden’s. “They are oftentimes the only thing between good and evil, and between chaos and calm.”
But activists have still asked Democratic lawmakers to make clear that they understand the problems with policing go beyond the need for body cameras or sensitivity training, and some have begun to respond. Mr. Buckhorn said policymakers needed to address legitimate “built-up anger,” but he also cautioned, “Anybody who is suggesting that they defund the police, whatever that means, I think would be making a terrible mistake.”
Senator Kamala Harris of California, a former district attorney and state attorney general who is seen as a possible running mate for Mr. Biden, said on Monday that public safety needed to be reimagined. Even a number of progressive Democrats do not think Mr. Biden should suddenly veer left.
“To have cities where one-third of their entire budget is going to policing, yet there is a dire need in those same cities for mental health resources, for resources going into public schools, resources going into job creation — come on, we have to be honest about this,” she said on ABC’s “The View.” Several young black leaders said Mr. Biden should pursue a criminal justice overhaul, and seek out and elevate activists who are organizing peaceful demonstrations.
She did not call for eliminating all police officers. “That puts him in front of people he’s not usually in front of and demonstrates what kind of leader he is,” Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist II of Michigan said.
President Trump’s re-election campaign had sought to focus attention on how Mr. Biden was responding — or not responding — to calls to defund police departments. Trump officials and surrogates on Monday held a conference call with reporters in which they argued that his silence on the call to defund the police was an implicit endorsement of it. Quentin James, who runs an organization dedicated to electing African-American officials, said, “I don’t think we need him to say ‘defund police,’ but he can help lift up groups like Collective PAC that are trying to elect reform-minded prosecutors.”
It was their latest attempt to tie Mr. Biden to the most progressive wing of his party, and to portray the Democratic Party as soft on crime. Mr. Trump’s attempts to mount a soft-on-crime campaign against Mr. Biden may prove difficult. The 2020 presidential election, after all, is not Mr. Biden’s first attempt to balance the public’s appetite for change with deeply rooted conservatism in much of the country.
“Where has Joe Biden been?” Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign’s communications director, said shortly before the Biden campaign released its statement. “By his silence, he is endorsing chaos and anarchy and lawlessness.” He channeled the rage of young voters who were furious about Vietnam and Watergate to claim a Senate seat in the same year that Richard M. Nixon won a 49-state re-election landslide thanks to the perceived excesses of the Democratic left and its presidential nominee, George McGovern.
After Mr. Biden released his statement through Mr. Bates, Mr. Murtaugh pressed the former vice president to comment himself. Ever since, Mr. Biden, 77, has carefully balanced the passions of activists with the sensibilities of the political center, portraying himself as both a champion for racial equality and a reliable ally of law enforcement.
“Joe Biden is the leader of his party and he could single-handedly step in and steer elected Democrats away from this terrible policy, which invites chaos in American communities, but he has remained secluded in his basement saying nothing,” Mr. Murtaugh said in a statement. “The ‘defund the police’ train has already left the Democrat station, and Joe Biden is merely a weak passenger.” His statement on Monday and speech last week in Philadelphia reflected the impulses of someone who, for much of his career, represented a state that was politically competitive and split between a heavily urban northern tier and its “slower lower” rural south.
Katie Glueck, Astead W. Herndon and Annie Karni contributed reporting. Mr. Biden’s positioning also owes to his grounding in a Senate where forging consensus was a necessity even if it meant, as he memorably noted last year, working with segregationists.
Such comments infuriated many Democrats during the party’s presidential primary race, especially younger progressives who, at their most charitable, viewed the candidate as a well-meaning if out-of-touch relic from yesteryear.
Yet then as now Mr. Biden has been greatly aided by Mr. Trump, whose divisive message and conduct have only alienated up-for-grabs voters who are craving stability. At this stage in the campaign, voters are comparing Mr. Biden — to borrow a Bidenism — not to the Almighty but to the alternative, and so far Mr. Trump has offered little to Americans seeking a sympathetic and textured response to the crisis.
Mr. Biden is also finding it easier to stake out ground in support of overhauling the police because the polling has shifted considerably on the issue, making it harder for Mr. Trump to gain much leverage from his repeated calls for “law and order.”
A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll indicated that just 27 percent of voters said they were more worried about the protests, some of which have turned violent, than about the death of Mr. Floyd and police conduct.
“With the video footage we are now seeing, even the typical voter who’s all for law and order is not going to be able to ignore the fact that in some police departments, in the department themselves, they lack law and order,” said Representative Anthony Brown, Democrat of Maryland.Mr. Brown likened this moment to the violence that law enforcement inflicted on civil rights protesters in the 1960s, which he said was when “decent Americans woke up and said, ‘Hey, that’s wrong, we have to do something.’”
Just as there were divisions in the civil rights movement between older leaders and younger, more radical activists, however, some of the same generational differences exist today.
“I’ve seen this in neighborhood meetings where a young person will come in and say, ‘We have too many police officers here,’ and I’ll see a senior saying, “Oh, no, no, that’s not true,’” said Mayor Nan Whaley of Dayton, Ohio, a Democrat.
This split has also found its way into the ranks of Democratic lawmakers. On Monday, Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina — who is now the highest-ranking black member of Congress but, in his youth, was jailed during protests — bitterly complained on a private conference call with other lawmakers about those trying to “hijack” the swelling movement with calls to defund the police.
Later on the call, however, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, 30, warned against actions that would “demoralize or undercut” protest leaders, according to a House Democratic official familiar with the conversation.
Mr. Biden has sought to avoid inflaming either constituency. In his speech last week, he was blunt that the story of America “isn’t a fairy tale.” Yet he invoked the Civil War, the Great Depression and often bloody civil rights protests to argue that “in some of our darkest moments of despair, we’ve made some of our greatest progress.”
Representative Colin Allred of Texas said that recalling past crises and the progress that emerged from them was a way to assure voters that better days are ahead while also recalling pre-Trump presidential leadership — “a call for change and a call for restoration,” as Mr. Allred, a Democrat, put it.
In the swing state of Nevada, Chris Giunchigliani, a Democratic former member of the Clark County Commission, warned her party that incremental improvements to policing would not be enough. Making a few changes at the federal level and then declaring victory, she said, might “give people false hope that things are fixed,” when an overhaul would require meticulous work at the state and local level.
“To folks who want to defund: You need a police department, I think that’s reasonable,” said Ms. Giunchigliani, a former candidate for governor. “But I think it’s time to take a step back and work on: What should policing in the community be?”
As encouraging as the polling on police issues is for Democrats right now, many in the party are wary of putting too much confidence in the expressions of support from white voters who have historically recoiled from seeing public officials at odds with law enforcement.
Partly for that reason, black leaders are eager to see Democrats press hard in the coming weeks for the moderate slate of policy changes proposed on Monday, in the hope that they could be passed swiftly in an environment that is favorable but could turn out to be fragile.
Marc Morial, the president of the National Urban League, said he believed the country was at a “transformative moment,” in which the killing of Mr. Floyd had shaken white voters from passive sympathy to active support for overhauling law enforcement.
“I think there’s always been support there, but I think it’s been muted,” said Mr. Morial, who served two terms as mayor of New Orleans. Now, he said, there’s a new majority and it’s not at all silent.
Reporting was contributed by Katie Glueck, Astead W. Herndon and Annie Karni.